By Fr Victor Ferrao
“What does a woman want?” was a question raised by Sigmund Freud to discern the primacy of desire in his work. Though Freud expressed is inability to answer the question that he raised, one might object to the sexist overtones of his language. Staying away from the sexist problems in the question, we can rephrase the question to discern the desires that we are riding today in our society by asking: ‘what does a Goan want?’
Desire is always a scopic desire which means every desire demands to see. Thus, for instance a desire for revenge is articulated when someone says: ‘I will see you’ or ‘I will show you’. This means desire is a scopic (ocular) drive. There is complexity at work in the psychodynamics of desire. Some say that we do not really want to get what we desire neither can we really satisfy our desire(s).
Desire has to have an object that is paradoxically absent. It is by being absent that the object of desire produces a craving for it. The lack is a source of desire. Hence, the question that we have asked boils down to asking ‘what does a Goan lack?’ This takes us to scrutinize the psychodynamics of the sense of lack that might haunt us as Goans differently from several others. It does not mean that we as Goans are captive to a singular desire. We harbour intertwined and even intra-rivalled intensities of different desire(s). All this depends on how the psycho-socio-politico-economic and religious flows and pulls intensify to produce sense of lack within our society.
The sense of lack creates pathways for desire to take hold of us or a section of our society. Hence, it is important to understand how a sense of lack comes into being in relation to an Other. That is why desire has a direct relationship to the desire of the Other. This is the reason while we are attentive to the psychodynamics of the sense of lack, we have to understand the role of the Other that brings in a feeling of lack. The feeling of lack produces a desire to fill the lack (vacuum). Hence, we have to discern the various Others (real or imaginary) that seem to generate desire(s) in our society. The Other that we are concerned here is certainly one that is viewed (seen) as rival and even and enemy. Hence, the other that we strive to bring to light may be within or outside our society. This takes us to the religious Other, ethnic Other, political Other, caste Other, tourist Other, economic (rival) Other etc. Each of these Others produce multiple intensive flows, pulls, pushes of attraction and repulsions that generate different degrees of sense of lack among us in Goa. Hence, desire is provoked in the self by the Other in the context of the intensive presence of the Other but when one rides one’s desire one bears the responsibility of being an agent of desire. Hence, depending on the depth of the sense of lack that we Goans or section among us feel different desires emerge and take control of people in our society. Therefore, the question that we have raised is highly complex and depends on forces and contexts that operate inside out, outside in, top down or bottom up in our society.
The felt sense of lack determines the trajectory of desire in our society. Hence, ‘what does a Goan want?’ will be relative to this different waves of sense of lack that take a grip over our us. Perhaps if we survey our collective recent past, we might find how our profound sense of lack that generated desire was milked by different vested interests to push their agendas. Thus during the last election both for the State and national level Goans felt a void in the context of the so-called corrupt Congress and attempted to ride their desire to ‘see’ a corruption free Goa and India only to feel a disappointing void of deception. The growing corruption, denial of self determination (democracy) to parents, rising inflation (onion tears), the casino nuisance, forced Mopa airport, Tiracol land grab to name a few issues are already producing a sense of abandonment of the Goan interest by ruling BJP and its cronies. Hence, within the context of these intensive conditions, the political Other of the self of Goans appear to be out to bargain the Goan interest on the altar of the economic Other. At the same time to deflect the sense of void felt among us Goans, often the religious Other is scapegoated as an enemy, masking all real issues facing us. Hence, question, ‘what does a Goan want?’ becomes complex and invites every Goan to become highly aware of the modes of production of desires in our society and respond critically and responsively to the imperative (call) of desire(s). Like, Freud, I do not have one answer to this important question. It is for us Goans to discern and nurture those desires that will celebrate and save Goa and Goan-ness.
(Fr Victor Ferrao is the dean of Rachol Seminary)
